TY  - JOUR
AU  - Casella,Alessandra
AU  - Gelman,Andrew
AU  - Palfrey,Thomas R.
TI  - An Experimental Study of Storable Votes
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9982
PY  - 2003
Y2  - September 2003
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9982
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9982.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alessandra Casella
Department of Economics
Columbia University
420 West 118 Street
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212/854-2459
Fax: 212/854-8059
E-Mail: ac186@columbia.edu

Andrew Gelman
Department of Statistics
and Department of Political Science
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027
E-Mail: gelman@stat.columbia.edu
AB  - The storable votes mechanism is a method of voting for committees that meet periodically to consider a series of binary decisions. Each member is allocated a fixed budget of votes to be cast as desired over the multiple decisions. Voters are induced to spend more votes on those decisions that matter to them most, shifting the ex ante probability of winning away from decisions they value less and towards decisions they value more, typically generating welfare gains over standard majority voting with non-storable votes. The equilibrium strategies have a very intuitive feature---the number of votes cast must be monotonic in the voter's intensity of preferences---but are otherwise difficult to calculate, raising questions of practical implementation. In our experiments, realized efficiency levels were remarkably close to theoretical equilibrium predictions, while subjects adopted monotonic but off-equilibrium strategies. We are lead to conclude that concerns about the complexity of the game may have limited practical relevance.
ER  -